UC Berkeley

Abstract

Contention and Control: U.S. City and Police Responses to the Occupy

Campaigns of 2011

by

Nicholas B. Adams

Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Kim Voss, Chair

Research on social movement repression and protest policing has identified four main factors affecting police responses to protest: political context, police capacity, police culture, and the characteristics and actions of the movements police face. However, there has been little consensus about when or under what conditions these factors influence police decisions. Case studies and large-N studies featuring thin data on incomparable cases have not been able to assess the relative strengths of these factors in determining protest policing under varying circumstances. This dissertation treats 184 U.S. Occupy campaigns as a natural experiment on U.S. cities and towns to explore how political context and police factors shape protester and police behavior, and how they do so over the course of protest campaigns. Using innovative text-analysis methods that combine the best of human hand-coding and automated techniques like topic modeling, this dissertation analyses reports of protester and police activities from over 8,000 local, regional, and national news accounts to find (1) that the Occupy campaigns followed a rather similar life course, and (2) that, contrary to going sociological theory, police are influenced by political elites at the city level and behave strategically. City and police responses are more decisive in cities where political authority is relatively concentrated in an executive. Police are more accommodating of movements when elections are near. Police with relatively small budgets or workforces are more likely to shut down protest campaigns sooner. Departments with relatively fewer officers are also more likely to avoid force-on-force mass arrests, preferring to arrest individuals and smaller groups of protesters. Police departments dedicated to a community policing philosophy are more accommodating of movements, and more likely to focus enforcement efforts on individuals rather than engage in group punishment. And, departments in cities with high violent crime rates are more likely to take a nonchalant approach to protest campaigns.